Why I Don't Live in an Apartment

NYC apartment woes.

Enough said.

UPDATE: For SheSaid who doesn't wish to register with the NY Times. (I have a hotmail address that I use for all such registration.) Here are some of my favorite quotes:

“One night, the sound was so horrendous I went up and knocked on the door for the first time,” said Ms. Bielfield, a retired publishing and marketing executive in her 70’s. “She opened the door and in the background I could see this youngster”— the neighbor’s 5- or 6-year-old grandson — “jumping up and down on a trampoline. With no carpet underneath. She said, ‘I’ll do whatever I want’ and slammed the door in my face.”

One downstairs neighbor, an elderly woman, grew irate when the 5- and 10-year-old boys upstairs bounced balls. “She would complain to the doorman, the super, the managing agent,” said Jennifer Roberts, a senior vice president at Bellmarc who had sold the boys’ parents their three-bedroom apartment in the East 70’s. “One day, she came upstairs when the mother wasn’t home, and she took the ball and hit the kid.”

But if noisy toys and boys are torture, one could argue that three 200-pound teenagers wearing cleats and playing football overhead at 11 p.m. is more on the order of hell itself.

Then, there were the mandatory “team meetings” organized every few weeks in the younger women’s living room. The object was to “tear apart every problem, but she would focus on things like dirty dishes in the sink, that we had too many plants and too much furniture, causing damage to the ceiling below our apartment. And whenever we would bring up any problems with the lack of heat”—at times the temperature dropped to 50 degrees in the winter —“or the freezer, she would say, ‘That’s not my problem.’ Anytime you would challenge her on something, she would say, ‘I’m not going to renew your lease.’ ”

After reading the article again, I'm extra pleased with my decision.